Family riches and poverty.

As the basic cell of society, the family is naturally constituted to support social justice. Fired by sacrificial love and supported by a network of moral duties and rights, family members are strongly motivated to keep each other out of poverty. The family, in fact, is the most effective anti-poverty agency we have. Consequently, an important way of exercising the preferential option for the poor is to insist on the preferential option for the family.

Single parties

We perhaps don't realize how effectively families counteract poverty until we look at what happens when they break down or are incomplete in the first place. Single-parent households, nearly all headed by women, face persistent financial challenges. Between 1975 and 1992, they were approximately five times more likely than two-parent families to be poor. Even worse, children of single parents are more likely than their counterparts in intact families to have emotional and behavioural problems, to abuse drugs, to get pregnant as teenagers, to drop out of high school and to run afoul of the law. So we're not just talking about material poverty. Spiritual poverty also dogs irregular families.

And it is not just the children who suffer. Single parents, whether mothers or fathers, are often stressed to the breaking point. Single parenting is not only financially trying, but emotionally and physically exhausting.

Researchers have consistently shown that the married are healthier, physically and mentally, than the unmarried. Donald DeMarco has cited a variety of studies indicating that the married suffer less illness due to coronary diseases and cancer of the digestive organs, among others, and lower rates of neuroses, psychoses, suicide, and overall mortality. The data demonstrate "categorically" that people who marry and stay married "stand a decidedly better chance of enjoying continued health and wellbeing than do those who do not marry or whose marriages are terminated . . . by death, divorce, or separation."

It should be obvious from the foregoing that if we are committed to social justice, we must demand policies that protect and support intact families. We must treat families, the basic cells of society, as something special.

Church teaching

It is in dealing with the family that the Church's sexual and social teaching support each other. By insisting that marriage is a lifetime commitment, that sexual union is for husbands and wives exclusively, and that this union must always be open to new life, the Church strengthens families. That is to say, it strengthens the most effective anti-poverty agency we have. On the other hand, by proclaiming the family the basic cell of society and defending its rights and privileges, the Church reinforces its sexual teaching.

Divorce and illegitimacy weaken the family by creating single-parent households. Contraception weakens the family by compromising the mutual self-giving of spouses. Couples who practise natural family planning have a very low divorce rate.

When societies suppress family privileges and authority in the name of individual rights and freedoms, individuals stand naked before the state. But individuals cannot withstand the power of the state. Consequently, we must, above all, stop treating individuals, rather than families, as the basic cells of society. We must, as William Gairdner urges, define marriage very strictly in law "as a socially privileged institution for the joining of man and woman in society's procreational project, thus establishing the natural family as the ideal."

Not only must we entrench the legal and social privileges that protect and promote the nuclear family. We must prevent politicians and judges from granting spousal privileges to partners who do not commit permanently to each other or, as in homosexual unions, to society's procreational project. The state can weaken the family by dispersing its privileges as well as by curtailing them. Consequently, we must exclude the unqualified from receiving them. We must, for example, deny them the health coverage, employee benefits, income tax concessions, inheritance and pension rights, and adoption privileges that spouses claim because of their marital status.

Canada's policy

In view of what has been happening in Canada, it is not unfortunately just a question of preventing the granting of such benefits and privileges to the unqualified. It has become a question, rather, of withdrawing them. Politicians, bureaucrats and judges have been dispersing spousal privileges with careless abandon, and thereby diminishing the esteem in which the family ought to be held.

I noted that single-parent households have been approximately five times more likely than two-parent families to be poor. But rather than discourage single parenthood, the Canadian welfare state accommodates it, even celebrates it. It treats single-parent households as alternative living arrangements equal to two-parent families, and it subsidizes them. Little wonder that there are more of them than there used to be. Universal welfare payments and an undue emphasis on individual rights make it easier for family members to go their separate ways instead of working out problems together.

Generous government transfers suggest to many women that marrying the state is a reasonable option. Professor John Richards, author of Retooling the Welfare State, believes that these transfers "encourage young women to enter knowingly into single parenthood." By the early 1990s, he says, nearly half of younger single mothers had never been married. That is twice the comparable rate for the early 1970s.

The morality that safeguards intact families is largely dismissed by our governments, which treat sex inside and outside marriage as virtually equivalent and facilitate no-fault divorce. As we have seen, this hobbles the most effective anti-poverty agency we have. So if we claim a preferential option for the poor, we must challenge governmental failure to uphold sound public morality. To counteract illegitimacy and divorce, we must promote chastity as a civic virtue and marital commitment as a civic duty.

If poverty was just a matter of not having enough money, we could solve it tomorrow. We could bypass the poverty industry, all the politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, social workers and others who make a good living out of helping the poor, and redistribute enough money directly to bring everyone above the poverty line.

Let me give just one example. Ottawa spends an estimated $7 billion a year on aboriginal programs. If it bypassed the Indian industry and divided up the money, the federal government could provide approximately $40,000 a year to every native household. Voila! Aboriginal poverty would be no more in Canada.

Guaranteed annual wage?

Of course, all those who benefit financially from helping the aboriginal poor would be the first to protest, as would the untold numbers who benefit financially from helping the poor in general.

But I think we all know instinctively, and perhaps also from experience, that a guaranteed annual income is not the answer. It won't decrease drug abuse, alcoholism and illegitimacy. It will not bring fathers back to the children they have sired and then abandoned. It won't make incompetent or irresponsible parents competent or conscientious. It may not decrease the number of homeless, most of whom are on the street not because they lack money, but for more complex reasons.

In the early 1970s, the American government undertook a huge demonstration project in Denver and Seattle to assess the impact of guaranteed incomes on work effort and marital stability. Among people receiving income guarantees, work effort declined by between 30 and 50 percent and marriage breakdown rose by about 60 percent, compared with levels in a control group largely receiving benefits under a conventional welfare program. It is understandable why work effort would decline. Many people working hard to stay out of poverty would be tempted to take things easier and accept the free money. But why the rise in marriage breakdown? Social critic George Gilder says the marriages break down "because the benefit levels destroy the father's key role and authority" when it becomes obvious that "...his wife and children can do better without him."

Professor Richards appears to agree. It is still true, he notes, that, by and large, women are the primary child rearers and men the primary income earners. The more government transfers replace this male function, the lower the relative importance of the male role. Not working, he adds, induces in many men a loss of self-respect, increased rates of depression, and a tendency toward self-destructive behaviour.

It has been said that most people will escape poverty if they complete high school, find and persevere in a job, even at minimum wage, and get and stay married. The high school diploma helps them find work, the wages enable them to get married and start a family, the added responsibility encourages them to hold on to the job or find another. Under these circumstances, very few are likely to remain at or near minimum wage. On the other hand, if they drop out of school, wait for the ideal job to come along before going to work, produce children out of wedlock or get divorced, their chances of living in poverty are much increased. +

Joe Campbell writes from Saskatchewan and contributes frequently to Catholic Insight on a wide range of issues but especially on Catholic social teaching.